The Edge of Sleep

Chapter 15

Becker slept for an hour then awoke, as fully alert as if he had slept the night through. He didn’t move when he woke, just opened his eyes and lay still, listening, assessing his environment. As always he had a reaction to the darkness, a quick, involuntary flinch of the nervous system that he grasped and controlled before it could escalate into fear. There was no reason for fright, he told himself, no cause for alarm. His heart was pounding and his skin tingled with the rush of adrenaline, but he forced himself to lie still and listen.

He told himself the time was now, not then. The demons of the dark lay in his past-or in his soul-but not here within this room. It was an ordinary night in his adult life, he told himself. The nocturnal noises could all be accounted for, the other breath came from the woman beside him. There was no tread upon the stair. His tormentors were long since dead, the feet that trod so heavily as they descended into the cellar had ceased to move years ago. His only torment now came from within, he reminded himself, and it required no racing heart to deal with it. There was no way to flee it in any event.

He continued to lie very still and to listen to Karen’s breathing. He was accustomed to jolting awake like this, sometimes soaked in his own sweat; he was used to the struggle to control himself, his reason straining against instinct and the unwarranted alarms of his subconscious. In recent years his reason had always won the battle and in time his mind would be in command of his body. The terror would be banished to whatever cave it lurked in within his psyche, the fear would be calmed and made to stand in place, if never completely banished. Anxiety remained with him always in the dark, but Becker was well used to anxiety; he regarded it as an almost pleasant companion compared to what lay in wait to take its place.

Karen’s breath was loud, slightly irregular, the breathing of a dreamer. Becker rolled his head to the side to look at her. She was facing him, her mouth open slightly, her hair falling across her face so that it moved slightly with each exhalation. She had kicked off the single sheet they used in the summer heat and her T-shirt had ridden up her body, revealing her bare legs and stomach, which looked ghostly pale in the night. She needed more time off from work, Becker thought. She needed to spend some time in the sun to get some color in her skin, but he knew she would take no vacation as long as Lamont was on the loose.

He could understand her obsession, it was the way he approached a case as well, but Becker could not remember a case that had yielded so little, so slowly. After weeks of grinding, they seemed no closer to a solution than when they had started, and the fault, Becker thought, was his. Either they were missing something or they were working on false assumptions to begin with. In most cases of serial murder the hardest part was the initial discovery that a number of murders were related. Or, as was, more often the case, that any murders had been committed at all. Frequently a serial killer was a hoarder of bodies as well. Dyce had dissected and boiled the bodies and stored the skeletons under his kitchen floor. Leon Brade had used the hair of his victims to stuff the crocheted pillows he kept in his grandmother’s house. In those cases, to discover one body was to discover most of them and after that it was a simple manhunt with Becker after a fleeing quarry. The hunt might take longer or shorter, but once the quarry was identified it was a straightforward if painstaking business. The motive and methods of the deaths were almost irrelevant, an afterthought to be dealt with at a trial, but not essential matters in the chase. With Lamont there were bodies in plenty, but not so much as a scent of the quarry.

They must be looking in the wrong places. Becker thought. Maybe the killer’s method that Becker had hypothesized was all wrong and all the time and effort that had been spun off of it was just so much waste.

Becker eased out of the bed as softly as he could. Karen’s breathing and position did not change. His wife, Cindi, had slept as lightly as a cat, often waking if he so much as tossed in bed. Often he would come joltingly awake as he had just now, doing nothing more than opening his eyes, and her warm hand would slide across his chest to comfort him. As if she were connected to him in some psychic way that he could not understand. Becker tried to shake off the thought. He did not want to start thinking about Cindi now, not as he slipped out of Karen’s bed. If he started to dwell on Cindi he could be at it all night.

He felt along the floor until he found his underpants. Becker and Karen had made love upon going to bed-as they had every night-and had fallen asleep immediately afterwards. Becker’s clothes were scattered across the room wherever Karen had removed and discarded them.

Wearing his shorts, he slipped silently out of the bedroom and into the living room. Still moving in the darkness, Becker went to the window and looked out at the night sky. The moon was the thinnest sliver but the stars seemed to be at their brightest. Becker stepped onto the porch and studied them. Stargazing had become an obsolete activity to all but astronomers, he thought, and what a shame. If one could get far enough away from city lights the night sky still twinkled and shone with as much fascination as it had millennia ago, nighttime’s eternal treat for the sleepless. When on a mountain-climbing foray, Becker would lie for hours watching the slowly wending parade of the heavens. Although human nature seemed to Becker to be getting ever more perverse, heavenly nature remained the same-beautiful, impossibly distant, and available to anyone who would take the trouble to look.

Checking first that no neighbors were about. Becker stepped onto the lawn and looked at the house. The grass was cool and damp against his naked feet. A faint breeze blew the warm night air against his skin. Becker walked to an elm that grew close to the sidewalk. Standing in the shelter of the tree so that he was all but invisible to anyone looking from either the street or the house, Becker studied the window where the light shone from Jack’s room.

To steal a child, he thought. To want someone else’s child badly enough to steal him. To change forever the boy’s life, his parents’ lives, the lives of his siblings, his grandparents, the widening skein of lives connected with the family. To take the risk each time of being caught and then to tire of the prize that had already cost so much in human suffering. To abuse the child to the point of death-and then to kill him and discard him as so much rubbish, to toss him aside like one more bundle of roadside litter.

It made no sense, of course, but sense was hardly the point. What it lacked for Becker was the emotional linkage that was necessary for him to follow the killer’s tortured route. There seemed no handles for Becker to grasp the killer’s mind. In other cases Becker had always managed to find a way to grip the thoughts of the madman. He had been forced to go deep within himself to uncover the murderous impulse in his own soul in order to do it. The price had always been high, but he had always done it The intuitive connection had always given him the scent of the killer and allowed Becker to follow him. Even when the trail had gone cold, Becker had always had the image of the killer in his mind because, at least for a moment of chilling introspection, he had been able to step into the killer’s skin, to breathe his overheated air, to feel the tremor of excitement in the killer’s heart as he committed his crime.

As he had told Karen, it was neither trick nor magic, but an act of courage and honesty that allowed him to look at himself without disguise or hypocrisy. But in this case it had abandoned him. He knew only what it was to be Lament’s victim, not Lamont. There was something wrong, something hidden in the crime, or in Lamont, that Becker could not find within himself.

Becker stared at Jack’s window. He imagined himself standing here now with the heart of a monster. But a human monster, a child who had grown to adulthood and become a monster, twisted and shaped that way by someone or something, or a thousand insistent somethings, so that now he stood as misshapen within as a gothic gargoyle. Becker imagined that he had come to take the boy who slept within that house before him. To slip within the room, past the sleeping parents, to lift the child from his bed and steal away into the night. Why? To what end? Becker knew the ultimate end, of course; the child must die, but killing him was not the point. The point lay in the six weeks of living. And it was not sexual. That was the most bizarre aspect to Becker. It did not conform with anything he knew or had intuited about the other monsters who came before this one. Sex was always a part of it.

Then forget the part he did not understand, he decided. Start with what he knew, let that draw him into the rest. First to steal the child. Experience that. Feel what Lamont feels when he sees the victim, sense the excitement, the dread, the irrepressible urge.

Becker stared at the light in Jack’s window until it seemed to narrow and focus itself. The light became a tunnel in the darkness, the only way to move, the only way to get where he needed to go. Silently, Becker approached the tunnel of light.

Like his mother, Jack had kicked off the sheet and lay exposed upon the bed. He wore shortie pajamas with a fire engine motif. The walls of the room were papered with athletes in action, kicking, catching, running, vaulting, and posters of football players adorned the walls. Jack looked even smaller and sweeter by comparison. He seemed to lie in a pool of innocence within his room, his little boy’s limbs and sleeping face in sharp contrast with the hard-edged adults upon the walls.

As he peered through the window at such sweet guilelessness, Becker tried to feel the urge to violate it, the raging, irresistible compulsion to have it, to seize the innocence and make it his own by devouring it.

The boy moved slightly in his sleep, rolling toward the window. It was, if there is such a thing, the face of an angel, and the monster at the window had to have it. Not because he hated it, for who could hate an angel? But because he loved it. The monster loved his victims. Lamont stole the boys because he loved them. It had to start from love, Becker felt. Only later did something go wrong and turn that love into an emotion that ended in death. But now, seeing the boy for the first time, the sense of love was close to awe. The desire to possess the boy was enormous, it made his body ache with hope. The monster turned from the window and started toward the door.

Karen was dreaming that someone was breaking into the house and then she was suddenly awake and aware that the exterior door was sighing shut against its pneumatic stopper. She was out of bed and had her service automatic in her hand before she remembered that Becker was with her. When she saw his side of the bed was empty she realized he had already heard the noise and responded.

She came around the door in a crouch, her weapon extended and held in both hands. Pausing for her heart to quiet, she moved forward into the darkened house, stopping every few feet to listen.

The living room was empty, and the kitchen. The light from Jack’s room was on and it pulled her toward it like a beacon. Outside her son’s room she paused again, her skin tingling with anxiety. She could hear the boy, moaning slightly as if in a dream, but she was aware of something else, another presence in the room.

Karen stepped into the doorway and saw a naked man leaning over her son.

“Don’t touch him, get your hands off him!” she said. Her voice was as menacing as a growl in the dark.

“I wasn’t,” Becker said. He turned his head slowly, very slowly, to face Karen.

Karen saw who he was now, but her position did not change. Her hands held the pistol steady and pointed at the center of his torso.

“Stand away,” she said. Her voice was still like the rasp of a file on metal.

Becker moved two steps from the bed and slowly lifted his hands above his head.

Karen looked at Jack, who tossed slightly in his sleep. He was obviously all right, undisturbed. She looked again at Becker, taking time enough now to really look at him. For the first time she realized he was wearing shorts. In her initial, panicked glance she had thought he was completely naked. The look on his face was wary, watchful, but not guilty.

Karen lowered the gun.

“Come out,” she said, her voice now a whisper. She was immensely relieved that they had not awakened Jack. It would have been some sight to see, his mother waving a gun at her near-naked lover, who was standing over his bed. How many years of therapy would be needed for that one, she thought.

Becker followed Karen into the living room, his hands still over his head.

“Stop that,” she said. She turned on a lamp and sat in the overstuffed chair opposite the sofa, the gun in her lap, no longer pointing at him.

Becker lowered his hands and sat on the sofa. Karen glanced at him and then away. His face was a mask of grinning irony. It did little to hide the hurt in his eyes.

“I thought…” she started. She could not say what she thought.

“You thought I was going to abuse him.” Becker said.

“I heard someone come in the house, it’s, what time is it, it’s three in the morning. I thought you were a burglar.”

“You knew it was me.”

“Christ. Becker, it’s three o’clock in the morning…”

“You saw I wasn’t in bed, you knew it was me.”

“Coming in and out of the house in the middle of the night? Why would I think it was you? There’s a naked man leaning over my son…”

“And you knew it was me and you thought…”

“I reacted. I just reacted, I didn’t think anything…”

“You’re still thinking it. I don’t blame you. I’d be thinking the same thing.”

“I wasn’t…” she said weakly.

“The world seems to be full of it these days. We’re swimming in it. It comes from everywhere-priests and fathers and boyfriends and baby-sitters… Paranoia seems very justified.”

“I know you. John, I know you wouldn’t…”

“How? How do you know?”

“Because I know you.”

Becker laughed. Cruelly, Karen thought.

“Nobody knows anybody that well. Including their shrink.”

Karen paused. The automatic felt cool and heavy on her bare leg. They faced each other in silence across the width of the room.

“What are you trying to say?” she asked.

“I’m saying you were right to react the way you did. As it happens, you were wrong in what you thought, but you were right to think that way.”

“You don’t mind that I thought-just for a second-that you were going to… ”

“I mind intensely,” Becker said. “I just don’t blame you for it.”

Karen paused again. She did not want to ask the obvious question, but she knew she had to. When she did, it would change her relationship with Becker, if it had not already been irretrievably altered. Not his answer but simply the fact that she asked, for within the question was the implicit demand for an alibi, an inescapable assumption of lack of trust.

Still, she had to ask the question.

“What were you doing?”

Becker was silent for a long time. Karen watched him absorb the question and its implication and the pain that it caused him.

“Working.” he said at last.

When he did not elaborate she asked, “Did you go outside?”

“Yes.”

“Dressed like that?”

Becker looked at himself as if assessing his costume.

“Yeah.”

She saw his jaw was set; he would be volunteering nothing.

“I don’t want to interrogate you, John.”

“Fine.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“You wouldn’t if I explained, either,” he said.

“You were working?”

“Uh-huh.”

She found it hard to look him in the face. He looked like a boy accused of lying by his parents for the first time, pained by the accusation, outraged by the injustice, stunned that his record of honesty was not sufficient to carry the issue, resigned that he would not be believed, and saddened by the loss of innocence. What was lacking was the recognition that he had come within a breath of having been shot. He was, she concluded, the strangest man she had ever loved; maybe the strangest she had ever known, but also the most interesting.

“I’d like to go back to bed,” she said.

They both lay awake the rest of the night, side by side but not touching, each pretending to be asleep.

As dawn approached Karen asked softly, “What did you learn?”

Becker answered as readily as if they had been talking for hours.

“He loves them,” he said. “Lamont loves those boys.”